Workers union questions non-resident workers quota scheme

The Federation of Trade Unions (FAMO)’s subordinates Northern District Workers Service Centre and Praça de Ponte e Horta Workers Service Centre has released its 2014 year in review, saying that they had followed up on 1,624 cases involving 1,939 individuals. Housing ranks number one in the cases the union had to deal with, which reached a total of 645 cases. Cases regarding labour affairs and welfare and security totalled around 40 per cent of the number of cases. The union revealed that they had received three cases where non-resident workers were authorised to have working permits but were never arranged to come to Macau to work. One case involved dozens of workers of a sub-contractor on the Light Railway Transit project. The union said that these companies asked non-resident workers to sign documents saying that they ‘voluntarily’ wanted to take non-paid leave or extend the date of their working contract to take effect without paying the employees. Vice chairwoman of the union, legislator Ella Lei Cheng I, said that these companies are abusing the non-resident workers quota scheme. She believes this would eventually hurt local residents’ rights to be employed. In addition, Ms. Lei revealed one complaint from a local resident saying that when searching for a job at the Labour Affairs Bureau some companies registered to hire crane operators at a monthly salary of MOP11,000. But the job has a market price of over MOP1,000 per day. The union suspects that these companies did not intend to hire any locals at all but planned to import cheap foreign labour instead. The union pledged to follow up on such cases. Other cases in the labour area mainly focused on unreasonable layoff, compensation for work accidents, overlapping holidays that hurt workers’ rights to take holidays and opinions regarding legislation on minimum wages. Ella Lei pointed out one case saying that a worker who had suffered from a work accident and was instructed by the doctor and legal medical expert to take 712 days off was deemed by the consultation committee and the insurance company to be only eligible to receive compensation for 365 days. She said such cases indicate that current legislation lacks effect in protecting victims of work accidents. The legislator said that currently the Legislative Assembly is studying the revision of the compensation scheme of work accidents and occupational sickness, Article by Article. She added that the union would transfer relevant suggestions so that the mechanism could better protect workers’ rights.